Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Big Band Renaissance

The institution
with it’s mission of preserving and perpetuating things related to Americana has discontinued its involvement with
issuing recorded compendiums of the music.

I have no idea why
it made the decision to abandon producing Jazz anthologies such as The
Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz or Big Band Jazz: From the
Beginnings to the Fifties, but I
suspect that it may have something to do with the fact that many Americans
today have little interest in Jazz.

Fortunately, for
me, and quite by happenstance, an Australian internet acquaintance was having
trouble negotiating the Smithsonian website during the early days of ecommerce
and put out a call sometime during the mid-1990’s for help to the members of a
stateside Jazz chat group to which we both belonged.

I volunteered to
try my luck on his behalf and luckily succeeded in ordering two copies of Big Band
Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra, the 1940s and Beyond.

After sending one
boxed-set safely on its way “down under,” I sampled my copy and was as pleased
with the written annotation accompanying the 4 CD set as I was with the music
it contained.

The booklet’s
introductory essay and the annotations for each of the retrospective’s 75
tracks were written by Bill Kirchner, who, as you may be aware, is a
composer-arranger, multi-reed player, educator and editor of The
Oxford Companion to Jazz. Bill also hosts Jazz from the Archives, a periodic radio series onWBGO. You can visit with Bill at his
website.

Talk about a
stroke of luck, if it hadn’t been for this Aussie friend-in-need, I might have
missed out on this excellent retrospective of American big band Jazz from the
Second World War until the close of the 20th century.

Incidentally, used
copies of Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra, the 1940s
and Beyond are still available from CD resellers.

According to
Bill’s acknowledgements, Bruce Talbot “… conceived the project and enabled it
to become a reality.”

Both Bruce and
Bill kindly granted the editorial staff at JazzProfiles permission to share the
following excerepts from the series booklet.

In addition to the
three videos at the conclusion of Bill’s essay which feature audio tracks drawn
specifically from the Smithsonian collection, we have populated Bill’s essay
with others films about big bands previously developed by the ace graphics team
at CerraJazz LTD.

“This collection
is intended as a follow-up to Big Band Jazz: From the Beginnings to the
Fifties (Smithsonian Collection
of Recordings RD/RC 030), compiled and annotated by Gunther Schuller and the
late Martin Williams in 1983. The objective of that set was to trace the growth
and development of the idiom from its beginnings to an arbitrary (by necessity)
cut-off point at mid-cen­tury. By that time, the swing era had passed, and big
bands were no longer the cynosure of either jazz or popular music. As author Ted Gioia observed, "In the early 1950s, jazz
was undergoing a major upheaval; it was ceasing to be the popular music of the
land and was evolving into a serious music for dedicated aficionados."

Until the end of
the swing era, virtually all of the hundreds of working big bands—from the most
jazz-oriented to the most commercial "Mickey Mouse"
varieties—functioned primarily as dance and show bands. Engagements at
ballrooms and dance pavilions, movie theaters, and hotels were mainstays of
their bookings. True, the most ambitious of them entertained other aspira­tions:
Benny Goodman led his band (along with guests from the Duke Elling­ton and
Count Basie bands) in a famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, and in 1943
Ellington began a string of annual Carnegie Hall appearances, lasting through
the decade, for which he wrote a series of extended works, the first and most
famous of which was Black, Brown and Beige. Other big-band leaders, most notably
Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton, chafed under the limita­tions imposed upon them by
the entertainment industry and sought ways to expand the vocabulary and resources
of popular music; several bands, for example, chose to add string sections,
some more successfully than others. But for reasons we will explore presently,
the number of big bands declined precipitously after 1946, and those of a jazz
stripe that continued to function did so under new rules.

Our survey of
these bands is divided into road bands, part-time bands, stu­dio bands, and the
avant-garde. The road bands were full-time ensembles that in most cases spent
the bulk of each year on tour. Of the major swing-era jazz bands, those that
survived into the ensuing decades were the Ellington, Basie, Kenton, Woody
Herman, Harry James, and Lionel Hampton bands. Other more commercial entities
such as the Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Jimmy Dorsey orchestras continued
as "ghost bands" after their leaders had died.

As the business
risks of leading a road band became immeasurably greater, there emerged a
number of major jazz orchestras that can best be described as part-time bands.
Such groups assemble on a limited basis and, however praiseworthy their music
might be, are not intended to provide full-time employment for their members. These
ensembles are frequently described as "rehearsal bands," but that
term does not do the most active of them justice. Many part-time bands have
recorded (some of them extensively), appeared in clubs and concerts, and have
even toured internationally; for this reason, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, among
others, resented the rehearsal-band label. While big bands declined as
full-time touring aggregations and as the focus of popular music, they remained
a backbone of recording until well into the 1960s. In a number of key
cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, London, and others—studio
musicians recorded daily in ensembles put together for specific recording
projects. Most of this work was non-jazz in nature—music for television and
radio commercials, singers' recordings, film and television scores—but, not
infrequently, record companies were willing to fund orchestral jazz on an ad
hoc basis in the 50s and 60s. A great deal of the best post-1945 big band jazz
was conceived for the recording studio, or for concerts presented primarily as
opportunities for recording. As author Max Harrison has commented,
"Despite their undoubted—if somewhat over­rated—contribution to jazz, the
swing bands, once established, stood in the way of further orchestral
developments. These could only resume when the bands came off the road and
orchestral jazz was created by ad hoc groups assembled mainly, if not
exclusively, for recording purposes. Such conditions allowed far more varied
instrumentation than hitherto, a wider choice of repertoire—which no longer had
to be orientated to a dancing public—and the application of more diverse
techniques of writing."

The last section
is devoted to orchestral developments in the jazz avant-garde, which for our
purposes can be defined as post-Ornette Coleman "new music." Like its
postwar antecedents bebop, "cool" jazz, and hard bop, avant-garde
jazz is primarily small-group music, but there have been efforts at using the
language (or, more accurately, languages) of the avant-garde in orches­tral
settings. A few of the most successful are heard in this collection.

It goes without
saying that some of the bands heard here do not fit neatly into a single
category. The Les Brown band, for instance, was a road band until the 50s and
thereafter was heard primarily on records and as a studio band on television,
though it continued to make annual USO trips with Bob Hope as well as
occasional appearances on its own. The Elgart brothers had bands that often
played for dances, but the recordings were done with a mix­ture of studio
musicians and road personnel—none of whom were identified on the album jackets,
by the way. And Dizzy Gillespie's mid-50s orchestra, included herein as a
part-time band, did two State Department tours and some other engagements but
was laid off and reassembled while Gillespie participated in one of Norman
Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic
tours as a featured soloist. But this Gillespie band lasted longer than, say,
Artie Shaw's 1949 road band, which had a lifespan of only a few months.

In any case, the
categories are used as a convenience. Most important is that all of the
ensembles heard in this collection have exceptional musical merit, and all of
the selections picked represent their best, though not nec­essarily their most
typical, jazz efforts; the Billy May selection is a case in point.

Big Band Renaissance begins with Jay McShann's Swingmatism because that recording, with
its featured soloist Charlie Parker, portends the beginning of post-swing era
orchestral jazz as much as any one recording can. (Ironically, other McShann
pieces featuring Parker that could have made that point even more emphatically went
unrecorded.) All of the other selections date from 1945 and later and represent
the blossoming of orchestral jazz as a listener's—as opposed to a
dancer's—music. In a few cases, recordings are used that are not big-band
formats as such, but that illustrate specific aspects of big-band
craftsmanship—the Benny Carter and Curtis Fuller-Manny Albam selections, for
example.

I have sought to
avoid re-treading ground already covered in Schuller and Williams's Big Band Jazz set, so no selections by
such bands as the 1940s Dizzy Gillespie band, Woody Herman's First and Second
Herds, and the Claude Thornhill band are featured. Exceptions to this rule
include the Boyd Raeburn band, this time represented by a George Handy
composition. Handy's work—not included in the earlier set—was, I believe,
central to the Raeburn band's impact.

In all, these 75
recordings represent a half-century of artistry in a musical genre that author Gene Lees has aptly called "the first important
new orches­tral formation since the symphony orchestra took shape in the time
of C. P. E. Bach." Of course, any collection such as this can serve only
as a sampling, and space limitations rear their ugly heads. There are many
worthy bands and composer-arrangers who could not be included because of such
limitations, and for that reason the listener is urged to continue pursuing the
subject.

Whatever an
individual's tastes may be, we hope that the diverse delights of post-swing era
big band jazz will be a revelation and will lead to further investigation of
its riches.

THE RISE, FALL, AND
REBIRTH OF BIG BAND JAZZ

What is commonly
known as the swing era (or, synonymously if not altogether accurately, the
big-band era) lasted for little over a decade. Its unofficial inaugural was the
Benny Goodman band's tri­umph at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on 21
August 1935, and the equally unofficial end came in December 1946 when eight
popular leaders— Les Brown, Benny Carter, Tommy Dorsey, Goodman, Woody Herman,
Ina Ray Hutton, Harry James, and Jack Teagarden—disbanded their orchestras
almost overnight. While this turn of events did not mean the end of big bands,
it did signal that the conditions that had facilitated their predominance were
changing. We'll explore these conditions in a moment, but first it should be
stated that big bands evolved over a period of at least two decades prior to
the Goodman band's ascendance. Commentators such as Gunther Schuller, James T.
Maher, and James Lincoln Collier have explored these beginnings in detail, but
the following will serve as a brief summary.

In the second
decade of this century the prototypes of the big band origi­nated in early
dance orchestras such as those of Art Hickman and George Morrison, as well as
the 369th Infantry Hell Fighters Band, a 50-piece African-American ensemble led
by James Reese Europe during World War I. In the 1920s and early 30s the
developments were continued by both black orches­tras (e.g., Fletcher
Henderson's, Duke Ellington's, McKinney's Cotton Pick­ers) and white ones (Paul
Whiteman's, the California Ramblers, Jean Goldkette's). There was much
cross-pollination between the black and white orchestras, and their collective
innovations were crystallized by a few key arrangers, including Ferde Grofe,
Bill Challis, Ellington, Don Redman, John Nesbitt, Benny Carter, Gene Gifford,
and Fletcher and Horace Henderson. Redman (1900-1964), who in the 20s was the
chief writer for Fletcher Hen­derson and McKinney, incorporated Louis Armstrong's rhythmic
innovations, the basis of "swing," into big-band scoring.
Furthermore, he used the call-and-response (antiphonal) pattern common in black
music and, along with Henderson, popularized it as a mainstay of big-band arranging—pitting
trum­pet, trombone, and reed sections against each other and then combining
them. This became the modus operandi for most swing-era bands; Ellington, who
conceived his orchestra as a collection of individual voices to be mixed at
will, provided the most distinctive alternative.

By the mid-30s,
these bands and numerous others—the Casa Loma, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford,
Bennie Moten, and Chick Webb orchestras as well as "sweet" bands
ranging from Guy Lombardo's to Hal Kemp's—had advanced the concept of the big
band to the point where a breakthrough to mass popularity could occur.
Goodman's triumph at the Palomar ignited that breakthrough, which was largely
made possible through radio: earlier that year, young West Coast fans had
listened with particular attention to Goodman's live national broadcasts on the
Let's Dance program, and had also bought his recordings. Unbeknownst to
Goodman, these fans were waiting for him at the Palomar, as were many members of
the Los
Angeles music community.

From the start,
then, radio was the greatest source of exposure for the big bands, and this
remained so throughout the swing era. Four major radio net­works broadcasted
the big bands every night, including "remotes" done from hotels,
ballrooms, and dance pavilions throughout America. In fact, until the 1940s, record
companies prohibited the playing of commercial recordings on the radio; only
specially licensed "transcriptions" were permitted airplay. This prohibition
was increasingly ignored, and a number of artists and record com­panies sued to
prevent airplay of their recordings. The suits ultimately were unsuccessful,
and the result was the rise of commercial radio as we know it today—disc
jockeys, "hit parades" and, later, "top forty," and the
decline of live music on the air.

Another
business-related development also had long-term cultural effects. In 1941 the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) demanded an
increase in money paid by radio broadcasters to ASCAP composers, among whom
were most of the major Broadway song­writers. The broadcasters refused and a
ten-month battle ensued, during which ASCAP-licensed music could not be played
on the radio. This led to the rise of Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), a rival licensing organization founded
by the broadcasters. The dispute was resolved—in the broadcasters' favor—and as
author Albert McCarthy has pointed out, "By this time BMI had destroyed the Tin Pan Alley monopoly,
and writers and publishers of country and blues material found an outlet for
their work that had previously been denied to them." This development
aided the national rise of formerly regional genres such as country, folk, and
rhythm-and-blues. And a decade or so later, it led to rock-and-roll.

But the most
serious industry blow to big bands was the American Feder­ation of Musicians
(AF of M) recording ban, begun on 1 August 1942 and not fully resolved until November
1944. Federation president James C. Petrillo, fearful that the playing of
recordings on radio and jukeboxes constituted a threat to live music, wanted
the recording companies to prohibit the use of records in these media. Petrillo
eventually revised his strategy, demanding instead a tax on recording dates
which, once agreed upon, ultimately led to the establishment of the Music
Performance Trust Fund, to this day an impor­tant funder of live music concerts
of all sorts that are presented to the public free of charge.

Before this
settlement, however, the union enforced a ban on the record­ing of instrumental
music. This ban did not include singers, who were not Federation members; they
continued to record, albeit only with choral back­ing, and by the end of World
War II solo singers had outdistanced the bands as the dominating force in
popular music. Also benefiting were small record labels, which settled with the
union earlier than did the three majors, Colum­bia, Decca, and RCA Victor. The non-majors,
with their lower budgets, tended to record small-group music of various kinds,
in the process breaking the dominance of both the Big Three and big bands.

World War II of
course created a slew of problems. Large numbers of musi­cians were drafted
into the armed services, seriously depleting the ranks of bands, and gas
rationing made travel more difficult for both bands and the public, as did
midnight curfews. On top of all this was a 20-percent tax on "entertainment"
(bands that played for dancing or that included singers), which discouraged
dancing; the tax, in fact, lasted well beyond the war years.

For that matter,
the effects of most of these problems, along with new ones, continued to mount
even after the end of the war. A postwar recession and the return of veterans
eager to settle down led to a reduction in spend­ing for live music, and the
introduction of television made most people that much more eager to stay at
home. A second AF of M recording ban, lasting through most of 1948, simply
worsened an already deteriorating situation. For the bandleaders, the costs of
keeping a band on the road—salaries, trans­portation, lodging—kept growing. So
did their nightly performance fees, which to some extent eventually priced them
out of the market.

As for the music,
it was growing, too, or at least the best, most jazz-ori­ented of it was. The
innovations of bebop, in the main a small-group music, were leaving listeners
dazzled, bewildered, or repelled, but in any case, jazz was drifting further
and further away from dancers and dance tempos. For the most musically
ambitious big-band leaders—Stan Kenton being a case in point—this was a welcome
development even though most road bands still maintained a "dance book,"
since dances remained an important part of their bookings. Kenton was fortunate
in that he was able to develop a large audience for a good deal of the music he
wanted to play. Few post-swing era jazz orchestras, whatever their musical
merits, have been able to make that claim.

Road bands,
part-time bands, studio ensembles, and avant-garde configu­rations have all
contributed to the wealth of big band jazz produced during the past
half-century, but there are other milieus that should be mentioned as well. One
is the rhythm-and-blues tributary, which produced some notewor­thy orchestras,
including those led by Les Hite, Lucky Millinder, composer-arranger Buddy
Johnson, Johnny Otis, and more recently, singer Ray Charles.

Another is the
largely European institution of state-supported big bands, many of which exist
primarily for broadcasting. The British Broadcasting Cor­poration (BBC) sponsored one as early as the mid-1930s;
one of the orches­tra's arrangers was Benny Carter. In the post-World War II
era, the most notable among such orchestras have been the WDR band in Cologne, the Danish Radio Orchestra, the UMO Jazz
Orchestra in Finland, and the Swedish Radio Big Band.
Interestingly, many of these bands have imported Americans as resident
conductors (Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, Jiggs Whigham, Bill Dobbins, and Rich
Shemaria), and many other American musicians have moved to Europe to play with
them.

In the United States, tax-supported jazz orchestras are rare,
and most of the few that do exist are maintained by the armed services. The Air
Force Air­men of Note, the Navy Commodores, and the Army Jazz Ambassadors are
all based in Washington, D.C., and others are based in the hinterlands.
Also, in a handful of American cities, municipally named jazz ensembles have
been founded.

Since the 1970s a
new big-band development reflecting a growing interest in jazz history has
gained momentum. Jazz repertory had its beginnings with the worthy but
short-lived New York Jazz Repertory Company and Chuck Israels's National Jazz
Ensemble, and other such ensembles have followed: the now-defunct American Jazz
Orchestra, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orches­tra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, the
Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orches­tra, and bands led by Loren Schoenberg and
Walt Levinsky. All of these bands have, in varying ways, concentrated on works
of the past.

But the most
important refuge for big bands has been the jazz education movement. Begun in
earnest after World War II and based in large part on the foundation of big
bands (or, as they were euphemistically known for years, "stage
bands"), jazz education has flourished. In the United States alone there are thousands (estimates range
between 15,000 and 20,000) of secondary schools with big bands, and hundreds of
colleges. The best of the college bands, including those at the University of North Texas (formerly NorthTexasState), the Berklee College of Music, the
Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and elsewhere, play on a profes­sional or
near-professional level, and many of the finest jazz musicians of the past
three decades have emerged from these programs.

The irony of this
situation is that, all of this activity notwithstanding, pro­fessional
opportunities for jazz orchestras are not expanding but may in fact be
diminishing even further. Most of the few remaining road bands have become
history in the past decade, or now work sporadically as ghost bands. Travel
costs continue to mount, performance opportunities have declined in number and
often do not pay a living wage when they do exist, and most com­mercial record
companies display little interest in big bands. In recent years it has become
the norm for aspiring leaders of big bands to produce (and pay for) recordings
of their groups and then to "shop the master tapes" in hopes of
having them released commercially by a label. The days when big-band leaders
made lots of money are obviously long gone.

In the future it
may be that big bands will survive in the way that sym­phony orchestras
currently exist: through public and private subsidy or under educational
auspices. There are pros and cons to such arrangements, but it remains to be
seen whether jazz orchestras and their music continue to evolve or become
period ensembles playing music of the past. Regardless of what happens, the
music—big band jazz—deserves to endure, and no doubt it will.

THE INNER WORKINGS OF A BIG BAND

Despite the
abundance of big-band recordings and fans thereof, there is frequently a lack
of understanding about how these bands are organized. Some words about this
will, I hope, add to the enjoyment of the music.

As most listeners
know, a standard big band instrumentation comprises a trumpet section (usually
four players), a trombone section (usually two or three tenor trombones and a
bass trombone), a saxophone section (usually two altos, two tenors, and a
baritone), and a rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums, frequently guitar, and
occasionally additional percussion). The trum­pet, trombone, and saxophone
sections each have a leader, known to musi­cians as "lead players."

Lead players in
big bands set the phrasing (how the written notes and phrases are articulated)
and dynamics (degrees of loudness or softness); the ability to do this, and
command a section in general, is a special skill, and a number of musicians
have had distinguished careers as lead players. This is especially true of lead
trumpet players, who have to dominate the entire band—not a job for the weak of
nerve. In the trumpet personnel listings for the selections, certain names
appear again and again: Cat Anderson, John Audino, Buddy Childers, Bernie Glow,
Conrad Gozzo, Jimmy Maxwell, Al Porcino, Ernie Royal, Nick Travis, and Snooky
Young. These are among the finest lead trumpeters in the history of big band
jazz.

Many discographies
and other listings of big-band personnel tend to mud­dle the order, especially
of trumpet and trombone sections. The listings are often alphabetical or
haphazard, giving no inkling of the actual makeup of the sections. When
possible, I have attempted to list the section players in the order of the
chairs they played, a matter complicated somewhat by the fact that trumpet and
tenor trombone players tend to pass parts around the sec­tions. Because of the
nature of brass instruments, lead trumpet and trombone playing is physically
demanding, and it is common for lead players to exchange certain parts with
other musicians in their section in order to give themselves a rest.

Until recently,
lead players, especially trumpeters, tended to be non-improvisers or only
occasional ones, although this situation has changed somewhat. Improvising
trumpet players normally play the third or fourth book in a section, trombone
players lead or second.

In the saxophone
section (sometimes called the reed section), things are somewhat different. The
lead alto player is more likely to keep all of the first parts and to be an
improviser; lead alto players, like lead brass players, sit in the center of
the section in order to be best heard. All of the saxophonists may well be
improvisers, though the tenors tend to be the most featured.

Most swing-era
saxophonists were also expected to "double" on clarinet, and baritone
players on bass clarinet. With the advent of the Boyd Raeburn and
Sauter-Finegan bands, doubling took on a whole new complexity, and the results
were very influential, especially for studio recording. It is now com­mon for
big-band saxophonists to double on flutes (which, unlike other wood­winds, do
not have reeds) and clarinets, and sometimes on soprano and bass saxophones,
piccolo, bass clarinet, alto and bass flutes, oboe, English horn, and bassoon.
(Gil Evans took things a step further by eliminating the saxo­phone section
from most of his bands and using mixed woodwinds instead.)

The rhythm section
is the foundation of any big band, or for that matter, any jazz ensemble. All
of the players have time-keeping functions, and all except the drummer (and
non-mallet percussionists, if any) have harmonic functions as well. It is
particularly important for the bassist and drummer to hook up rhythmically as a
team; it is often said that the most important musi­cians in a big band are the
drummer, the bassist, and the lead trumpeter. If all of these players do their
jobs well, the rest of the band will follow.”

Here are three
examples from the 75 annotations that Bill prepared to accompany the tracks in
the Big Band Renaissance anthology along with a video tribute to the bands of
Charlie Barnet, Buddy Rich and Clare Fischer, respectively, to give you an example
of the music on hand in the collection and Bill’s excellent insights and
observations about it.

“Charlie Barnet
[1913-91] re-formed his band around the same time as [Benny] Goodman did [late
1948], and it lasted about the same amount of time, but Barnet embraced the new
music [Bebop], whereas Goodman merely tolerated it. Barnet acquired arrangements from a variety of
forward-looking writers, including Gil Fuller, Manny Albam, Paul Villepigue,
Tiny Kahn, Obie Masingill, and Dave Matthews, and he put together a band whose enthusiasm matched his.
It included a five-man trumpet section with powerhouse players; others who
passed through the section included Maynard Ferguson, Ray Wetzel, and Rolf Ericsson.
(During this period, Stan Kenton was inactive, and Capitol Records apparently
was hoping that the new Barnet band could fill the void. Barnet's orchestra,
incidentally, was one of the first after Kenton's to use a bass trombone.)

One of the band's
most interesting recordings was Eugipelliv,
the title obviously the backward spelling of its composer's surname. At its
core a blues in G-minor, the piece is an amalgam of rich Ellington-like
saxophone scoring (led by the leader's soprano), Latin rhythmic elements, and
Villepigue's con­siderable originality. Barnet also recorded Villepigue's
lovely ballad Lonely Street, but what could have become a major
writing career was tragically cut short in 1953 when Villepigue took his own
life at the age of 33.

Barnet himself
continued to lead bands for "pickup" engagements and occasional
recordings as late as the 1970s.”

“Buddy Rich
(1917-87) was a phenomenon: an enfant
terrible who became, after stints with Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey, one of
the most in-demand drummers of the swing era. He formed his own big band in
1946 and led one intermittently into the early 50s, but from then until 1966
Rich alternated between leading his own small group and working as a sideman,
most frequently with Harry James.

In April 1966 Rich
left a lucrative position with James and formed a new big band. This time,
through a mixture of showmanship, a shrewd choice of material (including
arrangements of current pop fare that attracted a young audience), and frequent
television exposure, Rich achieved the success as a big-band leader that had
eluded him in the 40s. For the rest of his life he maintained, with only short
hiatuses, a road band that remained a popular concert attraction.

The band's music
ranged from the substantial to the superficial, but to all of it the leader
brought his own unsparing intensity. (Though he was a renowned terror to his
musicians, Rich employed an abundance of excep­tional, and mostly young,
players.) Some of the most advanced writing was done by Don Piestrup (b. 1937),
a free-lance composer-arranger whose jazz activity was documented principally
by the Rich band; Piestrup eventually settled into a career writing jingles and
commercial music. Goodbye Yester­day is one of Piestrup's best efforts, and
it's a good example of his style: a fusion of Bill Holman-like linearity with
some of the newer harmonic ideas that were in the air in the 60s.

The band's
performance has the searing quality typical of Rich. Though he was a widely
acknowledged nonpareil technician—the highlight of any Rich concert was an
extended drum solo—he was a superb ensemble player as well, and that quality is
heard throughout this track, recorded live at Caesar's Palace. Aside from Rich, the band's most heavily featured
soloist was always a hard-driving tenor saxophonist, and Don Menza (b. 1936)
here fills that role to perfection. Don't miss, though, the subtle rhythm
section work of guitarist Walt Namuth.”

“Since his move to
Los
Angeles from the Midwest in 1957, Clare Fischer (b. 1928) has been one of the most
versatile musicians in residence on the West Coast—a singular stylist as
pianist, organist, composer, and arranger. He first gained attention as musical
director of the Hi-Lo's vocal group, then as arranger for recordings by Dizzy
Gillespie, Cal Tjader, and oth­ers, and most of all as leader on a memorable
series of record dates for Pacific Jazz in the early 60s.

Fischer's
wide-ranging musical interests have always included a deep knowledge of Latin
music; Miles Behind is a case in
point. Written in 7/4 time, it has a tuneful melody and distinctive harmonies
typical of Fischer, plus expert orchestration using instruments ranging from
piccolo and bass saxo­phone to Fender Rhodes electric piano and congas. (Notice
the use of six sax­ophones.) An especially clever touch comes after the trumpet
solo: Fischer gives the baritone and bass saxophones a complex line, then
places them in counterpoint while the other saxophones repeat that same line in
a higher register.

Fischer's band,
which played in the Los Angeles area in the late 60s, included some of that city's most
prominent jazz musicians. Of the soloists, the standout was probably Warne
Marsh (1927-87), a tenor saxophonist best known for his work with pianist
Lennie Tristano in the 40s and 50s. Here Marsh plays one of the most unusual solos
of his recording career, in a Latin setting rare for him.”

Tickets: Available at Door, but Reservations Recommended: (510) 547 8188

A FEW REVIEWS OF DENNY ZEITLIN'S SOLO PIANO PERFORMANCES

"...he is an improvisational artist whose skills are so expansive that he can integrate everything he hears into the fabric of his soloing. In the best sense, in the manner that has always been true of jazz's finest improvisers, Zeitlin constantly stretches the creative envelope, measuring himself only against the infinite demands of his music."Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times

"...Zeitlin delivered a riveting solo performance."George Goodman, New York Times

"In supreme command of the keyboard...he employs striking dissonances, he constructs extraordinary edifices of harmonics, he can be marvelously pianistic, with a velvet subtlety of touch. He is an original...Denny Zeitlin stretches jazz piano beyond any hitherto defined limits."Don Freeman, San Diego Union

"...He didn't show his brilliance through his technique (which he has), but through subtle improvisation, advanced and finely-tuned harmonic development, and a stupendous internal sense of meter...Denny Zeitlin's solo piano was the unpretentious highpoint of the festival."Munchner Merkur (Munich)